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Read other letters about this article
"I don't know how many saw "what would you do" on ABC the other night, but basically they had a couple actors in Paris acting like the stereotypical "ugly americans". The guy was wearing a Bush T-shirt. One of the bystanders (german accent), later interviewed after the act was revealed, said that wearing the Bush T-shirt was like her wearing a "I like Hitler" T-shirt. The fact that the vast majority of people outside the US think the same thing says something."
I saw that and told my wife that the German woman was far more rude (as well as ignorant) than the American actors.
Keep in mind that Europeans also hated Americans when Clinton was president. Here's an aticle from April 2000.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/040900-106.htm
According to the article, "The Clinton administration’s cheerleading—for example, its repeated description of the United States as being the 'indispensable' nation—strikes a threatening chord [in Europe]." Secretary of State Madeleine Albright used this very language in 1998 vis-à-vis Iraq: "[I]f we have to use force, it is because we are America, we are the indispensable nation, we stand tall—we see further into the future." The late Charles Maechling Jr., who served as a State Department official in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, took exception to Albright’s words: "Madeleine Albright is the first secretary of state in American history whose diplomatic specialty, if one can call it that, is lecturing other governments, using threatening language and tastelessly bragging of the power and virtue of her country."
(Ironically, while delivering a speech concerning the need to regain worldwide respect for America, former Democratic presidential candidate and now VP-elect Joe Biden on November 27, 2007, told an Iowa audience that the U.S. is an 'indispensable nation.')
